My question is, what is all this doing in the budget in the first place?

Send to everyone you know.

Summary: This itemized list of proposed budget cuts is real in the sense that it was encapsulated in a bill (H.R. 408) known as the Spending Reduction Act of 2011, a plan to reduce federal spending by $2.5 trillion through fiscal year 2021, and the specific amounts of savings to be gleaned by eliminating each item on the list come from a Republican Spending Committee report of January 2011. The Spending Reduction Act of 2011 was introduced to the House of Representatives in January 2011 and referred to committee, where it has remained ever since; it has not been passed or ever put to a vote.

The current identification of this list as "Paul Ryan's proposed budget cuts" is inaccurate, however, as it was not proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the 2012 Republican vice presidential nominee. The Spending Reduction Act of 2011 was sponsored by Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, not Paul Ryan, and Ryan was not among the bill's 32 co-sponsors.(Rep. Ryan, as Chairman of the House Budget Committee, has proposed a different budget plan ("The Path to Prosperity") for fiscal year 2013, which seeks to balance the federal budget by the year 2040.)

The estimate that "requiring collection of unpaid taxes by federal employees" would produce $1 billion in total savings has raised some eyebrows, but according to the Washington Post, records provided by the Internal Revenue

showed that "about 98,000 federal, postal and congressional employees owed $1.03 billion in unpaid taxes at the end of fiscal 2010." In February 2011, Rep Jason Chaffetz of Utah introduced a bill, the Federal Employee Tax Accountability Act of 2012 (H.R. 828), which would "provide that persons having seriously delinquent tax debts shall be ineligible for Federal employment." That bill was passed by the House but has not been voted upon by the Senate.

One of the few items on this list of proposed budget cuts which is not accompanied by a specific amount of expected dollar savings is the "Death gratuity for Members of Congress," which in the Internet-circulated version of this list bears the legend "Untold savings could result from this," suggesting that this item is a comparatively large one. In fact, it has been the traditional practice of Congress that when a member dies in office, an appropriation is made to provide the deceased member's spouse, children, or other next-of-kin with a one-time payment equal in amount to the member's annual salary. Since the current salary for members of Congress is $174,000 per year, and Congress averages about two deaths per year (84 members of Congress have died in office since 1973), the expected savings from the elimination of this tradition would be a bit less than $350,000 per year. (More recently, Rep. Bill Posey of Florida has sponsored a bill specifically seeking to "prohibit the payment of death gratuities to the surviving heirs of deceased Members of Congress," but that bill has also failed to clear its committee assignment.)